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Novell Releases SCO Letters
cyxs writes "Here is Novell's page with letters that have been sent back and forth between Novell and SCO. Very interesting read."
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Darl claims that Novell released the letters to them, and sues Novell for copyright violation.
Wasn't SCO supposed to reveal their cards a couple days ago? Haven't seen a lick of news about that... maybe they missed the deadline cuz all the executives have fled to tropical islands without extradition treaties.
SCO Purchases Specific Novell Assets
Wish they were so quick with pointing out what contract/copyright/trade secrets, if any, are actually violated by anybody they accuse of doing so...
When are the Red Hat and IBM cases scheduled for resolution anyway? This whole thing is going on for far to long. Why does it take so long to resolve these issues through the courts...
As is usually the case with SCO related news, Groklaw is picking the information apart. For now most of it is transcriptions of the pdf's, but also some first blush analysis.
(b) Buyer shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent of Seller. In addition, at Seller's sole discretion and direction, Buyer shall amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or shall assign any rights to, any SVRX License to the extent so directed in any manner or respect by Seller. In the event that Buyer shall fail to take any such action concerning the SVRX Licenses as required herein, Seller shall be authorized, and hereby is granted, the rights to take any action on Buyer's own behalf. Buyer shall not, and shall have no right to, enter into future licenses or amendments of the SVRX Licenses, except as may be incidentally involved through its rights to sell and license the Assets or the Merged Product (as such term is defined in the proposed Operating Agreement, attached hereto as Exhibit 5.1(c)) or future versions thereof of the Merged Product.
(from section 4.16 of the Asset Purchase Agreement). Novell was doing a license audit in 2Q 2003.
C|N>K
After the slashdotting novell receives today, they will know for sure that they have slashdot behind them 100% in the drawing, hanging and quartering of SCO.
Sue Goodwill does anybody else find that a funny name given the circumstances?
Groklaw already has been translating the PDF's into text as well as providing some good commentary.
From the looks of it, it appears that Novell is about to hit SCOX with a breach of contract suit. Additionally, the letters point out that the MS and SUN contracts should pay 95% of the amount to Novell.
With that in mind, it appears that SCO has lied on their latest earnings statement (fraud) as well as withheld information from Bay Star, etc...
SCO is in a lot of touble.
I don't drink because I have to, I drink to stop the voices in my head!
We can Slashdot them instead... :-)
Mike
It would be useful to have a copy of the asset purchase agreement in front of you, since these letters mostly refer to it in their arguments. Luckily, it looks like it's been OCRed and put up on Groklaw at here. The letters in isolation don't really make much sense, hard to figure out who's blowing smoke and who's not.
Grin. The following summary from groklaw seems to sum it up nicely.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2004011 30 20257821
May 12, 2003, SCO: We own UNIX. Those Linux thieves stole it. Now we are going to make them pay!
May 28, 2003, Novell: Your letter annoyed us. You don't own UNIX, we do.
June 6, 2003, Novell: Stick to the facts and stop threathening us.
June 6, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX, stop telling everybody you own it. You did that on purpose on the same day as our earning annoucement. We also want to know what IBM told you and what you told IBM.
June 9, 2003, Novell: You can't just terminate IBM's license, so stop claiming you will. We do have the right to tell you what to do, you know.
June 11, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX and we can do what we want. Stop telling everybody we can't, or else...
June 12, 2003, Novell: Come on, you can't be serious. When we signed the contracts we promised IBM you could not terminate the license. We at Novell keep our promises.
June 12, 2003, SCO: Okay, now you've done it. You didn't listen, so now we are giving IBM permission to keep using AIX. You may not like it, but it the way it is. The license will not be terminated!
June 18, 2003, Novell: Our press release about the copyrights coinciding with your earnings annouchment was purely coincidental. We do not want to hurt you, we are just protecting our interests.
June 24, 2003, Novell : You signed contracts with Microsoft and somebody else. You can't just do that without telling us first. What's up with that? So, we demand to get copies and demand that you do not do this again. Once we have the copies we will determine if you have to give their money to us instead.
June 26, 2003, Novell: You keep telling you own the patents and copyrights of UNIX. We do acknowledge you had the right to acquire 'some' of the copyrights and we are still looking into it how much exactly you are entitled to. In any case, you do NOT own the patents.
July 8, 2003, Novell: Please stop bothering our former executives.
July 11, 2003, Novell: You haven't paid us in 6 months, cough up the money! Also, we are definitely going to audit your ass.
July 17, 2003, Novell: We don't like you. You tell people lies. You thought you couldn't do that, so we didn't pay. Luckily for you we determined you could do that, so we will pay. Also, regarding the audit; we're busy, please come back later.
August 4, 2003, Novell: We noticed you registered the UNIX copyrights. We do not agree with that. You had to demonstrate you needed the copyrights and you didn't do that. Tough luck, the copyrights are still ours!
August 7, 2003, Novell: You withheld our money! No mather what your reasons are, you can't do that. We want assurances that this will never happen again. Compy!
August 20, 2003, Novell: You know what, we have a technology license agreement. We want copies of the source and binary code for all versions of UNIX and UnixWare. We tried to call, but you never called back. We want the code and we want to know when we can have it.
September 10, 2003, SCO: We don't agree with your interpretation of our contracts. You are conspiring with IBM to destroy us. SCO is not going to let this happen.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that AIX modifications made by IBM are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. IBM owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Stop bothering IBM.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that IRIX modifications made by SGI are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. SGI owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Even if SGI did contribute UNIX code to Linux, it was very small amount of code and it was removed very quickly. This simply does not warrant terminating SGI's license, so stop threathening that you will.
October 7, 2003, Novell: We heard you are going to send invoices to Linux u
Type 1: We now do Linux. This is one I like, since it's something I've hoped for some time: take Novell's kick ass administration tools (granted, last time was Netware 4.1-5, so maybe the new Java/web interface sucks, but I loved the old NWadmin tool and plugins), and mix it with Linux (powerful, free as in freedom, and has more configuration text files than most junior admins know what to do with).
I also like how they aren't going to "change" SuSE (at least, not yet). Their best bet would be to use SuSE as a development crew - moving things ahead, keeping a separate product (rather than wrecking it the way WordPerfect pretty much was), and incorporating it's advances into Netware [insert whatever number here] as an "added value Enterprise product" - much like Fedora versus Red Hat Enterprise.
Type 2: We will indemnify you. This doesn't bother me too much - after all, SCO is playing "Big Bad" to Linux out there: "Use Linux, and we will sue you." Novell is providing some legal peace of mind. Granted, you have to buy their "new" product, but my feelings are horribly hurt by that - after all, they have to pay for the scum sucking evil hearted - I mean, laywers after all.
Type 3: We actually own the UNIX copyright. This ties into Type 2 in a certain respect, only without lawyers. This is to give current SuSE and other Linux customers less fear. Basically, it boils down to this:
"We know that SCO says they own the UNIX copyright and because of that they think they can get money from you for anything Linux.
"Bullshit. The fact is, Novell still owns the important copyrights, and we won't sue you. See? We're nice.
"Please buy our products."
Type 3 doesn't bother me that much either, since it at least appears to be "We're nice people - honest!" Granted, they are still an amoral corporation which pretty much means they're not doing it out of the charity of their hearts but because they want to make a buck - but you have to admit *right now* they're at least showing more class than SCO.
Either way, I'm not concerned. I figure about 12-24 months from now, this will all go away when the lawsuits finally fail and SCO and such run out of money to pay the heartless gutter snipes - I mean lawyers, President Richard Simmons will be in office with the War on Fat, iTunes Music Store will enjoy brief market domination before being the aliens arrive from Zardon VI and eradicate the earth when they learn we've evolved lawyers.
Or - something like that. Just my opinion.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
None of the Novell letters to Darl start with "Dear Mush-For-Brains;".
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The real news is that SCO had a deadline to disclose to IBM, "with specificity", exactly what the claimed infringements are. That was yesterday. Neither IBM nor SCO has announced anything.
On January 23rd, there will be a hearing on whether IBM is satisfied with what SCO disclosed. Then we'll know quite a bit more.
Basically, Novell says that it's owed 95% of the revenue from the Microsoft and Sun licensees (hmm, SCO already gave a good chunk to the lawyers, oops), and that SCO has failed to make expected payments on revenue from other Unix source licensees (double oops). They want their money, which basically would cut SCO off at the balls.
SCO says that they have the right to enter into new kinds of agreements and that the Microsoft and Sun licenses are not revised versions of the previous unix source licensing arrangements, so Novell can go pound salt.
Novell asks SCO to stop harassing Novell's customers (all existing Unix source licensees) and trying to ammend contracts they have no rights to ammend, threatening to terminate liceneses for IBM and SGI that only Novell has the right to do so, being a general pain in the a**, and that generally SCO are a bunch of lying cheats (yes, it's all in there, fun reading).
SCO doesnt say anything about being lying cheats, but claims Novell's Unix source licensees are their licensees, even though Novell has a 95% revenue interest, and SCO receives 5% "commission".
In short, this correspondence provides a foundation for Novell to say SCO is in violation of the original Unix purchase agreement, and could form the basis for Novell to have SCO's rights to Unix terminated. Since SCO knowingly failed to list money potentially owed to Novell on either their earning statements and their official SEC filings, or the potential risk to loosing most of their recent income, SCO is probably in deep sh*t SEC-wise, which probably explains the mysterious exit of that SCO employee in charge of doing the SEC filings right before their last earning report was do. Naturally he would not wish to be the one to sign a false earnings statements.
I guess looking at this, Bubba will soon have a new "Mc"-bride at club fed.
From the letter dated 12 June 2003, from Novell and IBM:
Accordingly, pursuant to Section 4.16(b) of the Asset Purchace Agreement, Novell, on behalf of The SCO Group, hereby waives any purported right SCO may claim to terminate IBM's SVRX Licenses enumerated in Amendment X or to revoke any rights thereunder, including any purported rights to terminate asserted in SCO's letter of March 6, 2003 to IBM.
This, in a nutshell, is Novell withdrawning SCO's right to terminate IBM's license, which was reported last year on Slashdot. What I really want to see, however, is the ubiquitous Asset Purchase Agreement, which appears in both this letter and most of the other ones; the whole dispute (at least, between SCO and IBM) appears to hinge on this agreement. Unfortunately, the agreement will probably never see the light of day, for reasons of corporate confidentiality.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing voilation of our intellectual property or other rights."
And in response to the specific piece Jack Messman says in his response:
"In your letter, you analogize SCO's campaign against the Linux community to that of the record industry against major corporations whose servers contained downloaded music files. There are crucial differences between the two campaigns. The record industry has provided specific information to back up its allegation, while SCO steadfastly refuses to do so. In its allegation letter, the record industry provides evidence of allegedly infringing activity that is specific to the targeted company. This offers the company real notice of the activity, sufficient information to evaluate the allegation, and an opportunity to stop the activity if it determines the allegation is true. If SCO wants to compare its actions to that of the record industry, it should follow the example set by that industry and present specific evidence of the alleged infringement."
At the very least, read this entire response from Novell to SCO regarding it's letter to Linux customers. Jack has pretty much voiced *all* the concerns that the Slashdot community has come up with in a direct letter to Daryll.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
IT managers and and other executive decision makers who have been nervous about all the warning shots fired between the battleships in this war of words can finally feast their eyes on tangible evidence demonstrating the untennable position of Darl McBride.
In particular I point to the letter dated 12 Jun 2003 from Novell to SCO regarding the Asset Purchase Agreement between the Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. and Novell, Inc., September 19, 1995.
In this letter, Jack Messman pretty clearly identifies the absurdity of Darl's claims be referring to very specific portions of the Asset Purchase Agreement, which give IBM "irrevocable" rights, and states that Novell also retains certain rights, over which SCO has no say.
Now, I ask you, does this not sound like a man who is sure of his position and the position of his company? It seems to me that Linux users (corporate, individual, or those who've ascended to the next plane of existence) should be well in the clear from the majority of any claims SCO might possibly level. This evidence combined with the confidence exhibited by multi-million dollar legal defense funds set up to help those who might be the target of SCO legal action will go a long way to reassuring executives.
Now, if only the judges in this case would hurry up and slap SCO back into the last century, where they should have stayed...
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
----------begin-----------
Already did. You're next, penguin boy.
Love, Darl
-----------end------------
Some might not argee with me, but I think this lawsuit by SCO was inevitable for the Linux community. I have believed that Linux couldn't be considered a completely viable choice for many companies until something like this happened. Why? Because it hadn't been tested.
Linux is based on a new concept that many people don't understand. The right to freely use and change and redistribute doesn't make the Cooperate heads comfortable. Add that to the fact that most, if not all, distributions claimed not to take legal responsibility for their products. I believe that after SCO loses their lawsuit that companies will start providing legal immunity to their customers. In fact this is already starting to happen. Novell with their move into the Linux world has started to do this, IBM I believe is starting in some form or another and there could be others that I am not aware of.
Linux is going through its growing pains and afterwards it will be better for it. Once Linux moves through this, it will be well into it's young adult life. There will still be a lot of growth and "pain" involved but it will move on. While I know many will say, "But Linux has been around for many, many years," I say to them that yes, but it hasn't been tested legally. This will give it the legal ground to move forward and grow.
I remember several years ago during my early years in college one of my professors saying some time soon somebody would try to profit off of Linux's growth, they would take legal action and try to undermine the base that Linux is founded on. He also said that Linux wouldn't, and in reality, couldn't be a heavy weight contender in the marketplace until something like this has happened.
I believe that when all is said and done with the lawsuit Linux will be a better off and will show to all the skeptical CEO's and anybody else that is listening that Linux is a great foundation to build their network on and more.
Art by Mindy Herman, my wife.
sPh
Wow. That's just, wow. Publishing the correspondence like that is tantamount to saying, "Screw you. We have nothing more to say outside of court."
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Darl: Linux stole our stuff!
Novell: Where's your proof?
Darl: They did it, I saw 'em!
Novell: Where, show me...
Darl: It's over there!
[Novell turns around while Darl bolts out of the room]
I don't have time to read them now because I'm working
You're weird.. if I wasn't at work, I wouldn't even be here...
---
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. -- Will Durant
"Hell IBM could produce a 5year old child that could write header file..."
And his name is Linux?
I'd like to know how SCO can possibly claim others have infringed on their intellectual property when they've clearly shown that they have absolutely no intellect.
You know what they should do is make a Unix Like operation system without using any of the Unix code and just freely release it under the GNU then we shouldnt have these problems any more... Oh Wait... Never mind.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I was going to mod you up, but I decided to respond instead. Notice how everything in this SCO press release refers to previous SCO and Novell press releases. They don't mention a single contract, or anything else that would hold water in court. SCO knows press releases do _NOT_ mean anything in court. Hurray for everyone's favorite pump & dump scheme.
It would be wiser for McBride to perpetuate the release of Open Source operating system vis-a-vis in order to accentuate the capability contained within them.
Heh. Business lingo aside, it very much wouldn't have been wiser for the owners of SCO's OpenServer UNIX to have done so. Linux has completely eaten SCO's lunch with the exception of fields where necessary products for the operation of a business are available only (or cheapest) on SCO's OS line. Real, cheap(er) *NIX for mass market hardware instead of highly marked-up "big iron" was SCO's market before Linux came along and did everything SCO did better for free. SCO's OS line is dying, and there's pretty much nothing that they could've done to save it as a sellable products.
Instead, SCO acted in what an Ayn Rand-ite would've called its own "rational self-interest." SCO knows that its major source of revenue is going to be useless soon, so it's attempting to get another one. Building essentially a completely new software product line in a new market niche is far too high-risk and too low of a payoff compared to attempting to exploit the IP that they think they own. The current spate of lawsuits is a high-risk gamble too, but it's one with a much, much larger potential payoff.
Also, there's the whole principal-agent problem caused by the fact that the future of the executives of the board is not strongly yoked to the company going down in flames. Together, you have a recipe for callous, self-interested behavior by people who are committed to the idea that money is the best measure of success.
Instead we have been deploying Solaris and Mac OS X for the satellite locations.
Congratulations, you have played into SCO's hands. You have not adopted the platform that has killed theirs, and you have given money to Sun, a company that has decided to pay SCO a license for the product you purchased. This is exactly what SCO was hoping for.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You are sheilded from loosing basic assets
What if you are walking past and some of these loosed assets fly toward you. I imagine a flying fridge could take your eye out!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The movement to link litigious bastards to http://www.sco.com/ would be more interesting if we all let SCO know exactly how you feel. Make sure your link says http://www.sco.com/?sco=litigious%20bastards. (The query parameter will naturally appear in their server logs.)
Join Tor today!
How can they claim complete ownership of something that they are paying another company royalties on??? I'm no lawyer, but that implies Novell owns the copyrights.
I'm no lawyer, but I am an author and my publishers have to pay me royalties BECAUSE I OWN THE COPYRIGHTS TO MY WORKS. The same would apply here. So SCO doesn't even hold the copyrights, what a twisted web Dark weaves.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Tricksey penguinses . . . we told you they were false. They stole it from us . . . They stole it and we wants it back. Gollum, gollum.
-B
But, having seen the first file, I really do wonder if McFraud believes CEOs of companies such as Novell really need to be told, in words of one syllable, what Linux is and why its development model differs from proprietary software. It seems to me that he is the one who fails to grasp the situation. He really seems to be unable to grasp that huge teams of programmers are not the way to develop good software (as the Convicted Monopolist has proved time and again...) he does not seem to comprehend that anyone with a brain, a PC and a compiler is able to develop good code, if they want to. Many of course would not bother with the learning curve, they would rather do other things, which is OK of course, but they probably could, if they wanted to. The clever people will certainly create bigger programs of better quality quicker, as we all know. But none of this involves the race of supermen, with super facilities, which McFraud seems to suggest are necessary. Mere mortals, with slowish PCs, simply take a bit longer, but because there are lots of them, each doing their own little bit, and putting the bits together occasionally, it still happens at a respectable pace.
I think that like another nasty piece of work we like to revile on /. (the one who missed the Internet for several years, despite prodding from his employees, who now calls himself the Chief Software Architect), he simply is too stupid to understands what it is all really about.
Unix as a money-spinner has had its day (and thanks to stupid commercial and legal issues it never did spin as much money as it could have), in fact the OS as such has had its day. Wise companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell realise that now, and know that the future for them is in building hardware (if they are in that business) and/or providing middleware and support. McFraud is simply living in the past. BTW, the next thing to expire as a money-spinner will be the "Office" suite, they are almost two-a-penny now (strictly, two for zero pennies for the pedantic), a far cry from the $400 spreadsheet or WP originally. The fact is that like commodity hardware, commodity software is starting to get very much cheaper. In fact hardware costs are the driving force. It once may have seemed reasonable to put a $400 Lotus 1-2-3 on a $4000 PC/AT (guessing at prices, from the vague recesses of my fading memory, they might not be quite right), but to put a $400 Office suite on a $300 PC is sheer folly. The economies of scale apply to software far more than to hardware, likely marginal cost of an Office suite about $1 for the box and CD, but the Monopolist, the Fraudster and such like have tried to conceal that fact from the gullible public.
I look forward to reading more of McFrauds rantings when the load on the servers subsides.
Not posting AC, so this may actually get read:
People, please realize that EZEZ is just shilling for SCO.
This is really interesting.
1. A newbie, EZEZ, comes from nowhere, posts an SCO press release and gets a +2 moderation.
2. Somebody points out that it's the 1st post ever by EZEZ and gets moderated down for pointing out the suspiciousness of EZEZ's posting history (none) and posting content (an SCO press release).
Ladies and gentlemen, today I would like to show you exactly what I mean. For Exhibit A, I would like to show the contents of /etc/hosts where you will clearly see our IP:
Exhibit B, the output of traceroute, where you clearly see that this 127.0.0.1 is SCO's IP, ZERO hops from our main...Just go read the documents. It clearly says: All rights _with_the_exceptions_listed_. Uh, oh, small omission, right? go to the exceptions list and you will see that nearly ALL Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents are excepted.
Apparently all the Intellectual Property that was transferred in the original Purchase Agreement were the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare. The open group now owns the UNIX trademark so all the Intellectual property left is the trademark to UnixWare. Now you know why you haven't seen a lawsuit for "intellectual property" from SCOX.
Amendment 2 indicates that additional rights may be transferred. Correspondence indicates that this transfer has not taken place (even A2 validity seems to be still "unverified")